LoWAgent: A Low-Resource Multilingual Benchmark for Web Agents

Overview & Synopsis

Web agents are typically evaluated on English-language interfaces, leaving their ability to operate across the world's multilingual websites largely unexplored. This gap is especially significant for low-resource languages, where standardized resources for evaluating web agents remain limited. To address this gap, we introduce Low-Resource Web Agent Benchmark (LoWAgent), a benchmark for evaluating web agents across different low-resource languages (LRLs) in comparison to the default, English. LoWAgent evaluates web agents across English and four LRLs: Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, and Amharic. The benchmark comprises of six fully localized websites, instantiated across five languages to yield 3,000 task instances. We evaluate three closed-source and five open-source models across all five languages on all six websites. Our findings show that both closed-source and open-source models experience performance degradation for LRLs compared to English, with substantially greater performance drops observed among the open-source model agents. We further evaluate the robustness of the models on realistic interface disruptions, such as cookie notices and advertisement pop-ups, and find that these further degrade agentic performance. Finally, we show that post-training on a small subset of LoWAgent traces can significantly improve low-resource language agentic task performance, demonstrating the usefulness of our benchmark.